I started to feel guilty. Started to miss how things had been before. So I told him that maybe we should slow down. Think about an exit plan. Find a way so that no one got hurt, no one had to know.
He waited for me to finish my speech, outline all my reasons, before he pulled out his phone, and brought up the photo.
I’D THOUGHT WHEN I FINALLY learned who Anna had been going to see that I’d confront them about it, right then and there. But instead, I staggered home, dazed. It was hard to believe I’d finally gotten what I’d been waiting for—real confirmation. I’d begun to think it might not happen, that I’d never know. That maybe Mr. Matthews had simply been her coach, her English teacher, and nothing more.
I barely knew what to do with what I had now.
Which was basically a full confession. More than enough to make him talk to me, to convince him that I knew. The only thing I didn’t know was who he’d called. Which hardly mattered. Nothing mattered except that he had been the one. Anna’s one.
I’d thought there’d be a measure of relief when I learned the truth. To finally know who to talk to, to finally know that all this skulking around had served a purpose. I’d thought I’d come to terms with the possibility of it being Mr. Matthews, that I’d gotten to a place where I could handle it. Instead, I felt ill, unable to rid myself of the thought of them together, touching. Of him touching someone who looked almost exactly like me.
Images of skin on skin, with pressure and heat.
Not like butterflies.
Not like butterflies at all.
I DIDN’T EVEN PRETEND TO pay attention in any of my classes the next day. I didn’t pretend to take notes, didn’t look toward the front of the room.
I waited until the end of the day to confront Mr. Matthews, hoping to catch him alone, before track. When I arrived at his classroom, though, a girl was still there talking to him. She looked annoyed and Mr. Matthews looked frustrated. They both kept pointing to the same piece of paper.
I stayed outside until the girl left, her expression dark. Then I went in, closing the door quietly behind me.
He was walking around to the back of his desk, shaking his head.
“Mr. Matthews?”
His head jerked up, his face irritated, and then he saw me. For once he looked relieved to see me—he probably expected it to be that girl again, coming back for round two.
“Oh, hi,” he said, sinking into his chair. “I’m sorry—I didn’t hear you come in. I guess I’m a bit off-balance—it’s amazing how hard people will fight for the grade they want, even if it isn’t the grade they deserve. Makes you wish they put that same amount of energy and passion into writing the paper to begin with.”
I stood rooted in front of his desk. He turned a little pink.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that—it wasn’t very professional. What I can help you with?”
I took a deep breath and cleared my throat. His casual chatting had thrown me off. I’d expected to be able to get right to the point.
Another breath. I could do this.
“I know it was you Anna was going to see that night.”
He stared at me blankly, like he didn’t know what I meant. It was almost convincing.
I continued. “I know you were involved with her.”
His eyes widened and he straightened up in his chair. “Wait,” he said. “What?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t backtrack—I needed to get through this, and I’d begun to shake. “I want to know if she was with you that night. I want to know if—”
“Involved? Are you serious?”
I nodded forcefully. “I don’t want to get you in any trouble. I don’t care about that.” I clamped my hand on my arm to try to stop the shaking.
He began to stammer. “Jesus Christ, I would never— I can’t believe you’d actually think—”
“Stop it,” I said. “Stop. I know you were. I know. I heard you.”
“What are you talking about? You heard what?”
“I heard you say it. At your house. On the phone. How you didn’t want anyone to know, how they wouldn’t understand—”
He was shaking his head, standing up behind his desk. I kept going.
“—how her death changed everything. I heard it. I know.”
“Oh, Jesus. It’s not…” He didn’t seem to know what to say. The effort of even those few words seemed to push the air out of him, force him back into his chair. He looked dazed.
“I just want to know,” I said. “I want you to admit it. I need to know the truth. I need you to tell me what happened that night. Did she come over? Did she get drunk? What happened?”
He held his head in his hands and didn’t respond.
I hadn’t expected this. I’d expected denial, maybe anger, but not this retreat. I began to get desperate.
“Please. Tell me.” My voice was getting louder. I needed him to say something. To look at me and tell me something. Anything.
He shook his head, his eyes focused on the papers on his desk.
“Did you love her?” I didn’t know I was going to ask that. But once I had, it seemed like the only real question there was. The only thing that could give any meaning to what had happened.
“Jess—”
The second time I almost screamed it. “Did you love her?”
He looked up. In his eyes, I saw horror and sadness. Also pity.
You have no right to pity me, I thought. No right. I’m fine. You’re the one who— You’re the one…
I tried to say something else, anything else, to regain control. What came out was a huge, broken sob.
And then I fled.
He’d looked at it, the photo. It’s funny, he said, but you nailed her expression here—that frown, like she’s angry and on the verge of explaining why. People might think something was really wrong with her, sending a photo like this to a guy she’s never even talked to. The school, your parents, they might be really concerned.
It took a minute for me to understand what he was saying. Then it registered like ice water down my spine.
I’d tell them it was me, I said. I would.
That’s exactly what they’d expect you to say, he said.
Then he put his hand on the back of my neck, like a clamp.
BACK IN FOURTH GRADE, THERE was a long stretch of time when I had the same boring dream every night. In the dream, I sat in the living room with Anna, Mom, and Dad, and we were all reading books and eating apples. That was all there was to it. The only thing that changed was the color of the apples. Sometimes they were red, other times a yellowish green.
Anna still slept in the top bunk back then, and every morning she’d ask what I’d dreamed about. I’d tell her that it was the same dream as before. Then I’d ask what she’d dreamed about, and she’d tell me how her dreams had been filled with strange elongated animals, multicolored icebergs, and other surreal things. And I was jealous. Jealous of how she had the interesting dreams while I was stuck on this same dull dream of our family hanging out together in the living room doing absolutely nothing special.
Now I wanted that dream back. Needed it back. To know that when I went to sleep, I would return to that place. To the security, the normalcy of that moment. Of the luxury of not paying attention to each other, knowing that at any moment I could look up and see Anna there. That I’d look at her and feel like she was someone I still knew.
Because I had messed it all up. I had learned nothing from Mr. Matthews. Nothing about Anna, nothing about that night, nothing about how he’d felt about her. I wanted to bang my head against a wall, kick a tree—anything that made me feel something other than this ever-expanding hole of regret.
I’d spent so long trying to understand what had happened, and now I’d looked back at the wrong moment, looked back and lost what I’d been searching for all along. Mr.
Matthews was never going to say anything to me, was always going to be on his guard around me. I’d lost the last fragments of Anna left for me to find.
I WENT THROUGH THE NEXT day in a fog. As if on autopilot, I found myself walking toward the locker room after class. As soon as I got within a few yards, I stopped. I stood, my feet frozen in place, staring at the locker room door. I hadn’t gone to track the day before, and I couldn’t go today either. Couldn’t face Mr. Matthews. Couldn’t bear to see him.
“Hey, you okay?”
I turned to see Nick standing nearby, looking concerned.
“I’m fine,” I said.
He looked at me closely. “I’m not sure that’s true.”
“I just…I’m just not sure if I can take track today.”
“Sick or sad?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“Sorry?”
“Those are the two reasons why I don’t want to do things I usually enjoy, and I know you love track. Tell me which one it is so I can help.”
Sick or sad. I looked at him: at the planes of his face, at the way a fold had formed between his eyebrows that made me believe he really cared about my answer.
“What would you do if I said sick?” I asked.
“I’d buy you an orange soda from the vending machine to get you some vitamin C and then leave you be because that’s all I can do about sick.” He smiled. “Plus, you might get me sick, and I don’t half-ass being sick, so that’s me laid up in bed for a week, minimum.”
I smiled back, a little. “What would you do if I said sad?”
I expected this answer to be as flippant as the first, but the concerned fold reappeared. “If you said sad, I’d buy you whatever you wanted from the vending machine and then I’d stay by your side until you told me to leave you alone. Track and basketball practice be damned.”
He looked at me full in the face and waited for my response.
It would be easy to say I was sick. So easy to leave it at that. Sick was straightforward. Medical. Simple.
Sad, however, was complicated and messy. Too messy to get someone else involved in. But I was sad. And angry and frustrated and humiliated and a billion other things I had neither the inclination nor the strength to delve into. But at the base of it all, I was sad. So sad I ached from it.
And besides, I’d never liked orange soda.
“Sad,” I told him. “And also hungry.”
* * *
—
STANDING IN FRONT OF THE vending machine, I had a hard time deciding whether I wanted a Snickers or a Twix. Nick ended up getting both, claiming he’d eat whichever one I didn’t want, and then he got himself a can of diet soda.
“I thought you went for Big Gulps,” I said, watching as he fished it out of the machine.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said. “Besides, I’m trying not to indulge too much before the big game next week. You know, not too much sugar.”
Then we both looked at the candy bars in his hand.
“This is an important exception,” he said.
* * *
—
AT THE PARKING LOT, WE looked out at the cars. “Where to?” he asked. “I drove today, so I can take you anywhere you’d like.”
A beautiful boy was asking me where I wanted to go. The right answer, I knew, would be somewhere fun or interesting. Even romantic, if such a place existed in Birdton. I knew that was what I should suggest.
Then a breeze brushed my face and I heard the faint sound of a far-off generator roaring to life. The sound of wind and metal.
And I knew somewhere romantic, somewhere fun, wasn’t what I needed today. Today I needed to go somewhere else, somewhere I hadn’t been in a long time. Somewhere I didn’t want to go alone.
“I think I know where,” I said.
* * *
—
I WASN’T SURE I’D REMEMBER how to get there. But soon enough there were signs. Little wooden ones, not big glossy ones. WINDMILL MUSEUM, they said. Which made it sound very different from what it was, raising the expectation that there would, for example, be an actual museum.
“Is that where we’re headed?” Nick asked. “The Windmill Museum?”
I nodded.
“Sounds cool,” he said. “I’ve never gone.”
“I went once,” I said. “A couple years ago.”
The last leg of the trip was up a dirt road, and the car bumped along over the uneven ground. And then there it was, looming in front of us. A beautiful old windmill. There was no other building, no “museum,” only an old wooden box where you could contribute to the preservation of the windmill. And then there were stairs that went almost to the top and a small platform where you could sit.
“That’s great,” he said. “It’s…” He took one hand off the wheel and made a gesture up and down; then he was quiet.
“Yes,” I said. “It really is.”
He parked the car in the patch of dirt that served as the parking lot and we got out of the car and stood together, looking up at the windmill. The paint was starting to peel, and in patches the wood was visible underneath, yet the structure itself conveyed the same sense of solidity it must have when it was built more than a hundred years earlier.
“Do you want to go up?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I went first, climbing the steps slowly, then lowered myself to the platform, my knees up and my back against the heavy wood. Nick sat beside me. We looked out over the surrounding fields. The sun was still high above the horizon, and there were farms in all directions and mountains in the far distance.
“I came here once with my family. Anna loved the view,” I said. “And I loved the sound the blades made, like we might become airborne at any second. We didn’t even want to come and then the two of us ended up sitting here for over an hour until our parents made us come down.”
I turned around and searched along the wood behind me. At first I couldn’t find them, and then there they were: Our initials. Mine and hers, next to each other, tiny but unmistakable. I turned back, keeping my hand pressed over the spot.
“We meant to come back. It’s one of those places you always mean to come back to, you know? It’s not that far. We could have gotten our parents to take us anytime, and we never did. It seems so stupid that we didn’t.”
My throat started to close up.
“You thought you had plenty of time,” Nick said quietly.
“We should have. We should have had so much more time.”
He nodded and said nothing.
Which was perfect, actually. Saying nothing was the perfect thing to say.
I closed my eyes and imagined Anna sitting next to me, smiling, even as our parents paced impatiently below. Imagined the air warmer, the end of a long, hot summer. Imagined us when we’d spent every moment together, when it hadn’t mattered if we’d worn the same things or not, when there hadn’t been a question of Anna having to either hold herself back or cut me loose.
I knew that our relationship hadn’t been as simple, as easy as I’d once thought; I knew that even now I was probably glossing over things, making that memory more sun-soaked than it had actually been. I was okay with that. Because I had to believe it hadn’t all been me pushing her away or her striding off. That there had been times when we really were on the same page.
Eventually, the silence was broken by the distinct sound of my stomach rumbling. I coughed.
“I think I’m ready for my candy bar.”
“Of course,” Nick said, digging through his jacket pocket. He pulled out the two bars and presented them to me with a flourish. “Take your pick.”
I took the Snickers. It had melted slightly and the chocolate was soft. He unwrapped the Twix and we ate side by side, the sound of the windmill at our back.
* * *
—
IN THE CAR ON THE way back into town, the space between us felt like a living, breathing thing. Not a tense creature, all curled up with claws, but an inviting presence that my thoughts kept returning to. I found myself wishing we didn’t have to go back, wishing I could ask him to turn around and keep driving—to drive and drive and drive until the sun went down and the world was quiet.
But then I realized, for the first time in quite a while, that maybe there were things in Birdton for me. That I could stop chasing after Anna, stop following her shadow to dead ends, and instead concentrate on my own life and what to do next.
So when we got to my house and he stopped the car to drop me off, I didn’t get out immediately, didn’t reach for my seat belt.
“I’m planning to go to the game next week,” I told him.
His eyebrows flicked up and he smiled. “That right?”
“Yes.” Then I tiptoed out on the ledge. “So maybe we should hang out afterward. Get some food, or dessert. Something like that.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said. Then he paused. “Sounds like a date, even.”
I smiled. Because it did. Because that was how I’d wanted it to sound.
And I only hesitated for a moment before I leaned over and kissed him.
And he kissed me back.
The kiss felt nothing like what I’d imagined, and yet it was exactly right. It lasted for a couple of seconds; it lasted for forever. And throughout, my whole body was in my mouth and my mind was at peace in a way it hadn’t been in a long, long time.
I felt like I’d fallen into a deep well with slick, wet walls. There was no way out, no air.
I dreamt I was drowning, and when I woke the water was still pouring in.
I never thought any of this could hurt you.
Never thought anything I did could be used against you.
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